Preview Thoughts on Nantucket Sleigh Ride

After spending my last post talking about my preconceived notions, I will admit that I entered last night's performance of Nantucket Sleigh Ride with many biases - I am a big fan of John Guare's writing and I am inordinately fond of the man himself.  He has been kind and generous to me over the years, so I am probably constitutionally incapable of not liking his work.  I freely admit this bias and submit a few thoughts about last night's preview performance of his new play.

I will also admit that I had a hard time wrapping my brain around the large ticket price for an Off-Broadway production, even though I knew it would be a first-class event at the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre.  I had been debating not going to see the show, sort of out of a monetary protest, though I'm sure I would've relented at some point (there's no way I would miss a new John Guare play).  So I am extremely grateful to have been offered a discount through one of the many theatrical e-newsletters I subscribe to.  I could eliminate my sticker shock and concentrate on the work.

If internet gossips are to be believed, Nantucket Sleigh Ride is a revised version of an earlier Guare piece that played out-of-town a few years ago.  The Lincoln Center website doesn't make mention of this, interestingly (at least I didn't see any references), but a Google search turned up reviews from 2012 of a piece that must be the first draft of the play I saw last night.  It seems as if many of the themes and ideas are still there, but the storytelling methods are completely different.

Photo credit: T. Charles Erickson

John Larroquette stars as Edmund Gowery, who wrote a successful play in the 1970s, but left playwriting behind and now seems to be some sort of financial wizard.  The play begins as Gowery is subtly gloating over the fact that his name was a clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle (which drew a lot of chuckles from the audience).  Two other people saw that clue in the Times and have come to Gowery's office to confront him about what happened to all of them in the past (I'm being deliberately vague because I don't want to say too much, since this is in previews, and the unfolding of the story is part of its delight).  Much of the play, then, takes place during the height of Gowery's fame as a playwright, the 1970s.  Jaws is king, the rotary phone cracks up one member of the audience in an odd way, and leisure suits are a fashion statement.  The bulk of the play is a memory play, with increasingly strange memories.  Themes about the fear of intimacy, the loss of innocence, and how art can change lives, are explored.

Gowery is a very Guare-ian figure, in my opinion, with wit and blunt charm to spare, who seemingly lives life outside of, or above, the rest of us.  The character makes you feel smarter, and dumber, almost at the same time.  Jorge Luis Borges is a character in the play and there are references to Magritte and other auteurs of the day.  Gowery is an inveterate New Yorker, who is completely out of place (at first) in Nantucket, and his fish-out-of-water experience there grows more and more surreal as the play progresses.  Like a lot of Guare's earlier absurdist work, Nantucket Sleigh Ride is more fanciful and less linear than, say, Six Degrees of Separation, but Guare's genius in dialogue and character development is plainly evident.

In thinking about Nantucket Sleigh Ride, I went back to look at an old review I did of a revival of John Guare's Landscape of the Body; I think my words are pretty indicative of how I felt last night, too:  "No one does dialogue like John Guare, that's for sure.  This production, though very much of the time it was written (late '70s), is full of the whimsy and pathos of Guare's best stuff.  The production is a real roller coaster ride, and I have to admit, I wasn't along for the ride the entire way, but when I was, I loved it."

I was puzzled some of the time and enchanted at other times.  I had belly laughs galore and confused chuckles, as well.  Parts of the play tickled me to no end, and parts of the play put me off.  So...there you have it.  A completely confusing review.  Sorry.  The bottom line is, I guess, I recommend seeing the play, because, hello, new John Guare play.  But, also, this cast is first-rate (Larroquette is perfection and Douglas Sills is also an especial favorite of mine; he has more than one line/line reading that nearly made me choke with laughter), the design is fascinating, most of the themes will tickle your brain, and the experience of seeing the show is just fun.  Maybe confusing, but goshdarned fun as well.  There's one running gag that makes me smile as I'm remembering it.  I'm thinking, if another discount comes my way, I may try to go back at the end of the run.  Now that I've seen the play, I would love to try to understand how the construction works and try to untangle some of those puzzles for myself.  Maybe I won't figure them out, maybe I don't need to.  But as long as John Guare writes new plays, I'll go.  No one writes like he does and I will always hang on every word.